Funny you should mention that. The procedures for getting Old Age Security (OAS) and Canada Pension (CP) are so complex it almost takes an advanced university education to apply successfully.

I still don't have the complete documentation for OAS. I was out of the country from September 1968 to June 1978 and the government of Canada needs certified proof that I left when I said I did and arrived back (permanently) in June 1978.

I have no idea how I going to get that documentation. The information hotline is telling me that I have to get "proof of entry" from Canada immigration.

Happy birthday, Larry! In more solvent times, the California State University system had a plan whereby a professor could ease into the emeritus stage by teaching only one semester and getting salary/pension to cover an entire year, for five years.

One of my favorite professors took advantage of that plan. Cal did his five years, was hired back to teach one semester a year for another two years, and has since thrown his efforts into research. He's pushing 80, bounds into the office every morning and throws himself into his work, and slinks away in the early evening for a workout before dinner. He's never got less than three papers and at least one grant proposal in process.

Congratulations Larry. May your Gold Card save you heaps of money and may your amazing golden writing continue to enrich our lives for a long time. Thanks for all your efforts toward a more rational world based on better science understanding.

- from a fellow Gold Card holder who beat you to this honoured position by 20 days.

Darwinians traditionally have refused to test their propositions. They have always misunderstood natural selection which, while very real, prevents organic change, exactly as Leo Berg claimed in 1922 -

"The struggle for existence and natural selection are not progressive agencies, but being, on the contrary, conservative, preserve the standard."Nomogenesis, page 406

We accept this position as being in compliance with the testimony of the fossil record and the experimental laboratory. Accordingly, we reject the entire Darwinian model in favor of an hypothesis which proposes that the ascending series which the fossil record so clearly exhibits must have been planned by an unknown number of planners. We further believe that creative evolution is no longer in operation without a new Genus in two million years and a not a demonstrated new true species in historical times. Like ontogeny which also proceeds on the basis of information already present in the egg, phylogeny must have had a similar cause. Referring to ontogeny and phylogeny, each a part of the continuum which any evolutionary hypothesis must recognize, Berg offered this judgement -

"Neither in the one nor in the other is their room for chance."Nomogenesis, page 134

We accept Berg as we accept William Bateson, Henry Fairfield Osborn and Reginals C. Punnett who had all reached the same position before him.

"It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it to be true."Bertrand Russell

So much for the Darwinian paradigm. That it still survives, brands it the most persistent failed proposal in the history of science, the only conceivable position acceptable to the congenital atheist mindset.

Show that you are a man and respond to our assault on everything you hold dear. Do you really think you can go on indefinitely pretending that you have no critics? That has been the Darwinian way ever since St. George Mivart exposed natural selection as impotent in Darwin's own day. If you don't have the guts to respond, then do what Dawkins, Myers, Elsberry, Dembski etc, etc, have already done and banish me. You are pathetic.

Have you no pride at all? Don't you realize that many of the greatest scientists since Darwin have all rejected natural selection as having nothing whatsoever to do with evolution. By ignoring me you are ignoring all of them as well. 90% of my evolutionary science stems directly from such giants as Richard B. Goldschmidt, Otto Schindewolf, Pierre Grasse, Leo Berg, William Bateson and Robert Broom, each an acknowledged expert in his field and not one a religious or atheist fanatic. By allowing these names to appear on your weblog without recognition you are defining yourself as an intellectual bigot. Your willingness to present yourself in such a fashion can only be interpreted as self destructive.

I never thought I would live to see how pathetic Darwinian dogma really is. Unable to respond, Moran imagines that by allowing us to hold forth, he is winning the intellectual conflict which has always plagued evolutionary science. What is equally remarkable is the absence of anyone else supporting our position. Could it be that Moran does not allow anyone else to speak? So far no one has. Nothing surprises me any more as the Darwinista continue to demonstrate their insecurity by every devious means imaginable, denigration, ridicule, banishment and now with Larry Moran practicing the most revealing of all tactics, stony silence, the ultimate insult which has characterized the way in which the Darwinians have traditionally dealt with their critics. We continue not to exist as Moran has made crystalline by his cowardly stance here on his birthday thread. Happy Birthday Larry. You are a Prince among men.

The above link will give one a pretty good idea of what we are up against.

The description starts off by describing evolution as a theory. Evolution took place in the past. There is nothing theoretical about the reality of organic evolution. Furthermore, there is no theory of evolution because there as yet is no verified hypothesis explaining how it took (past tense) place. The whole series of five volumes is pure Darwinian wool gathering written by Darwinians for consumption by Darwinians. It does serve however to explain why our science remains acceptable.

We continue not to exist. For a potent antidote to this nonsense, buy my book, read our essays on evolution and draw your own conclusions.

“I have found you an argument but I am not obliged to find you an understanding.”Samuel Johnson

Laurence A. Moran

Larry Moran is a Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Toronto. You can contact him by looking up his email address on the University of Toronto website.

Sandwalk

The Sandwalk is the path behind the home of Charles Darwin where he used to walk every day, thinking about science. You can see the path in the woods in the upper left-hand corner of this image.

Disclaimer

Some readers of this blog may be under the impression that my personal opinions represent the official position of Canada, the Province of Ontario, the City of Toronto, the University of Toronto, the Faculty of Medicine, or the Department of Biochemistry. All of these institutions, plus every single one of my colleagues, students, friends, and relatives, want you to know that I do not speak for them. You should also know that they don't speak for me.

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Quotations

The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me to be so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows.Charles Darwin (c1880)Although I am fully convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite to mine. It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as "plan of creation," "unity of design," etc., and to think that we give an explanation when we only restate a fact. Any one whose disposition leads him to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties than to the explanation of a certain number of facts will certainly reject the theory.

Charles Darwin (1859)Science reveals where religion conceals. Where religion purports to explain, it actually resorts to tautology. To assert that "God did it" is no more than an admission of ignorance dressed deceitfully as an explanation...

Quotations

The world is not inhabited exclusively by fools, and when a subject arouses intense interest, as this one has, something other than semantics is usually at stake.
Stephen Jay Gould (1982)
I have championed contingency, and will continue to do so, because its large realm and legitimate claims have been so poorly attended by evolutionary scientists who cannot discern the beat of this different drummer while their brains and ears remain tuned to only the sounds of general theory.
Stephen Jay Gould (2002) p.1339
The essence of Darwinism lies in its claim that natural selection creates the fit. Variation is ubiquitous and random in direction. It supplies raw material only. Natural selection directs the course of evolutionary change.
Stephen Jay Gould (1977)
Rudyard Kipling asked how the leopard got its spots, the rhino its wrinkled skin. He called his answers "just-so stories." When evolutionists try to explain form and behavior, they also tell just-so stories—and the agent is natural selection. Virtuosity in invention replaces testability as the criterion for acceptance.
Stephen Jay Gould (1980)
Since 'change of gene frequencies in populations' is the 'official' definition of evolution, randomness has transgressed Darwin's border and asserted itself as an agent of evolutionary change.
Stephen Jay Gould (1983) p.335
The first commandment for all versions of NOMA might be summarized by stating: "Thou shalt not mix the magisteria by claiming that God directly ordains important events in the history of nature by special interference knowable only through revelation and not accessible to science." In common parlance, we refer to such special interference as "miracle"—operationally defined as a unique and temporary suspension of natural law to reorder the facts of nature by divine fiat.
Stephen Jay Gould (1999) p.84

Quotations

My own view is that conclusions about the evolution of human behavior should be based on research at least as rigorous as that used in studying nonhuman animals. And if you read the animal behavior journals, you'll see that this requirement sets the bar pretty high, so that many assertions about evolutionary psychology sink without a trace.

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution Is TrueI once made the remark that two things disappeared in 1990: one was communism, the other was biochemistry and that only one of them should be allowed to come back.

Sydney Brenner
TIBS Dec. 2000
It is naïve to think that if a species' environment changes the species must adapt or else become extinct.... Just as a changed environment need not set in motion selection for new adaptations, new adaptations may evolve in an unchanging environment if new mutations arise that are superior to any pre-existing variations

Douglas Futuyma
One of the most frightening things in the Western world, and in this country in particular, is the number of people who believe in things that are scientifically false. If someone tells me that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, in my opinion he should see a psychiatrist.

Francis Crick
There will be no difficulty in computers being adapted to biology. There will be luddites. But they will be buried.

Sydney Brenner
An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: 'I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one.' I can't help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist

Richard Dawkins
Another curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understand it. I mean philosophers, social scientists, and so on. While in fact very few people understand it, actually as it stands, even as it stood when Darwin expressed it, and even less as we now may be able to understand it in biology.

Jacques Monod
The false view of evolution as a process of global optimizing has been applied literally by engineers who, taken in by a mistaken metaphor, have attempted to find globally optimal solutions to design problems by writing programs that model evolution by natural selection.